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Where Is My DNS Hosted?

From time to time, you’ll have to make changes to your DNS records. For example, if you change IP addresses, your DNS A records will change. You’ll also change DNS if you want to add SPF records to help email authentication. For these changes to work properly, it’s vital to know where DNS is hosted.

DNS is always hosted at your domain’s authoritative nameservers. Your authoritative nameservers, and therefore your DNS, can be in three places:

Liquid Web’s nameservers

ns.liquidweb.com

ns1.liquidweb.com

ns.sourcedns.com

ns1.sourcedns.com

Your private nameservers on your server or another server you control

Ex.: ns.mysite.com

Where you registered your domain name

Ex.: Enom, GoDaddy, Namecheap, etc.

If you are using Liquid Web’s nameservers, you can update your DNS records in your Liquid Web account interface. If you use private nameservers on your server or another server, you can update DNS records in the control panel for your server (most likely WHM or Plesk, sometimes cPanel for SPF records). If your nameservers are where you registered your domain name, you’ll need to log into your account at that registrar and edit DNS there.

Either way you check your domains authoritative DNS you should always remember, if you don’t update DNS in the right place it wont take effect. This could mean your websites won’t load properly and can cause unnecessary downtime.

Discovering Where DNS Is Hosted – Web

Discovering Where DNS Is Hosted – CLI

You can easily find out where your DNS records are hosted using your server’s WHOIS entries.

Launch your terminal program. Every operating system (Windows, Mac, and Linux) has a terminal program: use your computer’s search function to look for “terminal,” then open the terminal program you find.

In the terminal window, type:whois mysite.com and press Enter. Be sure to replace “mysite.com” with your site’s domain.

Look specifically at the Name Server listing. In this example, you’ll see liquidweb.com uses Liquid Web’s nameservers. You might also see your own server listed as the nameserver (ns.mysite.com) or a domain registrar listed as the nameserver. This information tells you where you will be editing your DNS records:

If you use private nameservers: edit your DNS by logging into cPanel and searching for “Edit DNS Zone.”

If you use a different registrar’s nameservers: edit your DNS records by logging into your account at your registrar.

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Author Bio

About the Author: Dan Pock

Dan Pock does Technical Writing & Marketing at Liquid Web with a background in System Administration, Public Relations, and Customer Service.

His favorite things include: his cats, Oscar Boots and Dash Nouget; experimenting with PHP; and making up recipes (or at least attempting to). You can find his coding hijinks on GitHub, where he shares most of his projects and open source work.